


Heterodynes 101: Experiments in Familial Construction

by NevillesGran



Series: Heterodynes 101 [2]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, Family, Gen, Heterodyne Boys Era, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-17 15:09:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18967738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: The Heterodyne did not come to Wulfenbach with fire, nor with blood. He did not come with siege machines to blast down the walls. He did not come with jägermonsters. He came at the start of Transylvania Polytechnic University’s Spring Break with his brother, three suitcases between them, and Baronin Anna’s youngest son, who happened to be the last one she still had living.She set the dogs on them.





	Heterodynes 101: Experiments in Familial Construction

**Author's Note:**

> At some point between me starting to write this and finishing it, Phil Foglio said at a con that Klaus's body is entirely his original but his mind is made up of himself and his brothers. I have decided to ignore this and/or assume that he misspoke, because it's odd even for Girl Genius and I didn't want to figure out how that worked.
> 
> Also, Doylistically, Punch and Judy were more characters than was convenient to write, but Watsonianly they have the week off and are vacationing somewhere with warm beaches and no college students.

The Heterodyne did not come to Wulfenbach with fire, nor with blood. He did not come with siege machines to blast down the walls. He did not come with jägermonsters.

He came at the start of Transylvania Polytechnic University’s Spring Break with his brother, three suitcases between them, and Baronin Anna’s youngest son, who happened to be the last one she still had living. Said son had written in advance, multiple times, to ask permission and give warning. It was the first time he had invited anyone to stay over since the accident.

She set the dogs on them and watched from the inner wall.

The soft clunking of a cane on stone warned her that her husband was coming up behind her a moment before he took her hand. Rerich’s leg had been broken in an accident in his youth, twisted beyond even sparkwork’s help before anyone could reach him. Because the rest of him still worked and Wulfenbach was a more than respectable seat, even if it was lower than her father’s countship, Anna had happily married him anyway.

“I thought you were staying in the keep,” she said.

“It didn’t seem right not to greet them. Besides, Minerva got antsy when you let everyone else out.” He tapped the hound at his side with his cane. The hound, greying like her master, took it with the affection intended, and Anna did not comment that it would have taken Rerich nearly as long to climb up here as it had for her to walk around to the kennels and back.

They held hands and watched as the pack coursed through the space between the outer and inner walls (which in turn enclosed the space around the ancient Wulfenbach Keep, that strong tower that had stood within raiding distance of Mechanicsburg for centuries and only occasionally bowed.) The dogs were all Wulfenhünds of course, the family breed and business. Over three dozen black and grey and brown, fully or partially trained, waiting for sale or simply unoccupied with other duties today. Anna had ordered out the entire kennel save the pups, the wounded, and a minimum border patrol. Today, they invited the danger in through open gates.

 _Danger_ looked a lot like two young men, one gangly and one somewhat plump, who dropped their bags and went back to back with death rays when the opening outer gate revealed the charging, baying hounds. Klaus, white hair and broad stature unmistakeable, waved his hands emphatically and stepped in front of them with a bellowed, “Ease up! Ease up!” He held his duffel bag over his head in one hand, forgetting to pretend standard human strength.

The wave of dogs rippled with hesitation, but they had too much momentum to stop. Klaus went down beneath a yapping pile. About a third of the pack stayed back to eagerly greet him home, while the rest circled the Heterodynes, growling. A couple peeled off to check the gate guards, approving them them with faint tail wags.

“It’s our boy, then,” Rerich said. He squeezed her hand as Klaus’s laughter drifted up, interrupted by the dogs’ excited licks. “They would have torn him to shreds if they smelled a– Mechanicsburger.”

He stumbled over where he once might have said _construct_. It had been nearly ten years.

“Mm-hm,” said Anna, though of course he was right. She watched her son stand and introduce his friends to his subjects, four- and two-legged alike. Non-shouted voices were lost in the distance, but she knew what he was saying as the Heterodynes held their hands out to the dogs—“Friend, safe.” She imagined it was much the same for the human guards.

No one had shot or bitten anyone, but she would have preferred at least “Friend, threat.”

~{+}~

Anna had not been sure, at first, how to house the Heterodynes. Klaus’s letter had said they would probably prefer to share a room, and would be happy with any of the guest rooms. She’d wondered briefly whether it would be better to keep them together, maximum containment, or separated to diminish their ability to coordinate. She’d thought even more briefly about giving them the master bedroom for the duration, and moving herself and Rerich to one of the spares on Klaus’s floor—or to the library, more likely. Rerich already slept down there at least once a week.

It gave her a great deal more sympathy for Tarsus Beetle. When they received the letter from Transylvania Polytechnic that the new Heterodyne and his brother would be attending in the fall, Anna’s first instinct had been to forbid Klaus from going. The opportunity to withdraw was surely the purpose of the notice, and it had raised her estimation of Beetle’s integrity immensely, though not so much of his common sense. Of course, who was going to refuse a _polite_ request from a Heterodyne, offering to enter—the letter promised, quoting the Heterodyne himself—”with arms fit only to defend ourselves if necessary, and no jägerkin whatsoever.”

It wasn’t much of a promise. Anna’s father had been killed by decidedly non-jäger Heterodyne monsters, great hares with breath like ice and claws like iron. They had hopped the walls when her town thought themselves safely snowed in for the winter. Anna had been twelve years old.

But Klaus, he had reminded his parents, was a man grown, with a degree from Paris and a promise of a paying job and research opportunities in Beetlesburg. So she trusted _his_ common sense and let him go, without even a guard dog. She’d contented herself to another several years of erratic letters home and even more irregular visits, and wondered how on earth Beetle thought he was going to contain two Heterodynes for four years of education.

Oh, how the lighting branched.

But Anna Wulfenbach was not one for false flattery, not even to a Heterodyne with some sway over her son. The master bedroom was suited to a man with one lame leg and a helpful dog for fetching things, and moreover Wulfenbach had not surrendered to Mechanicsburg since before the time of the Storm King. They weren’t going to start _now_. If “the boys” wanted a single guest bedroom, then a single guest bedroom they would have.

(As far from her family as she could put them, without being obviously rude. Certainly not one of the spare rooms on Klaus’s floor.)

~{+}~

It was late afternoon when they arrived, and later by the time they’d settled in, so she only had time to corner Klaus on the stairs before supper.

“You are three months overdue for a medical inspection, my boy.” She poked his chest with one sternly maternal finger. “You were supposed to be home for Christmas. After dessert, it’s the lab for us.”

He backed up against the stairwell wall. “I did apologize for that. The experiments were time-sensitive…”

“Like letting your mother check your stitches?”

“Um. Yes.” He ran one hand through his hair and looked over her head instead of meeting her eyes. “Though I am rather tired from travelling, and all my readings will probably be better in the morning. But I promised to take the Boys—Bill and Barry—on a tour of the estate early tomorrow, and probably all day. They want to see how a normal town works, without students or anything attacking or, well, Mechanicsburg. So...”

Her heart skipped a beat. “You’re not going to show them anything of the defenses.”

“Of course not! Mother, they’re...”

He was still avoiding her eyes. “ _Klaus_.”

At last he dropped his gaze to hers. “They’re not ‘just kids’, but I wasn’t going to show them the Mortar Instruments or the kennels without asking you and Father. I do think they’d be trustworthy allies, even though, well, Heterodynes. But we’re on vacation, dammit, and they want to see livestock that isn’t meat-eating. So we’re going to do the boring things.”

“Those ‘boring things’ will be your charge, too, one day.” She worried, sometimes—he’d been the baby of the family.

“Yes, Mother,” he said meekly. “I’d like to see the new tractors you wrote about.”

~{+}~

“The Boys” were charming. They were both obviously making an effort at it, admiring the keep’s simple decor and telling self-deprecating stories of their time at TPU, which apparently involved more explosions and wild heroics than anything like classwork. Well, it _was_ a spark-driven university. The older—Bill, _the_ Lord Heterodyne—gesticulated excitedly as he described an incident involving a flying crab clank and an attempt at a milkable honeybee. The younger, Barry, was shyer to smile but quick to slide in a quip whenever his brother paused for breath.

Their father had smiled easily, too, and had wit quick enough to win a race. Anna had met him just once, when visiting a friend to see her new baby. Lord Saturnus had dropped in for tea.

She had travelled half a day by carriage, but she was going to stay the night and it was entirely worth it because Countess Eustasia von Ellert ( _née_ Volkenstorfer) was one of her best friends, and her smile was radiant as she showed off her newborn son. Teodora Vodenicharova was there as well, only a lord’s daughter but one of the few other noblewoman Sparks Anna knew, and always a delight to talk shop with. Mariya Selnikov, who was expecting a little more than her quite-recent marriage made it polite to discuss, had brought a dozen books about child enrichment and her cousin Terebithia d’Lyon, who was visiting from Paris to finalize her engagement to the heir to the von Blitzengaard dukedom.

Anna had been complimenting Terebithia on the _daring_ cut of her bodice when there was a sudden burst of shouting from outside. They had rushed to the parlor window—second story, fine glass, within safe city walls—only for it to shatter inward with the hurtling weight of a humanoid with matted yellow fur, twisted ram horns, and bloodied claws and teeth.

“Hullo, pretty ladies,” the jägermonster leered, as Eustasia and Teodora shrieked and Mariya screamed for help.

He turned back to the window, brushing off glass, and intercepted the blade of a woman in purple who appeared beside him. Terebithia swore under her breath as the monster threw the assassin out the window. He leaned after her and shouted, “Hoy! Hy found– hoy, vhere did hyu guys—”

Clashing blades and the burst of firearms came from down the hallway, and one of the Count’s guards rushed inside. “My lady, we—”

The jäger lunged for him, claws first. Eustasia drew a pistol from somewhere discreet and fired at the monster’s back. A knife appeared in his furred throat with the same hilt as Terebithia’s hair clips. The monster stumbled to his knees. Anna raised a footstool over her head, to catch him on the downswing.

The ladies might have won the day had another man not skidded into the room, followed by two more jägermonsters. They slammed the door shut behind them; he shot the footstool with a ray that made it disintegrate in Anna’s hands and slid in the guard’s blood to a stop beside the yellow jäger.

“Hyikes,” he said, peering at the monster’s cut throat. “That’s definitely poisoned. Here.” He took a bottle off his belt and passed it over. “Haff some brau, und keep the pressure on. Hyu ken take the door.”

The jäger nodded and rasped something unintelligible—too monstrous to lip-read, and voice box apparently damaged beyond immediate repair.

“Ivan, hyu schtay by the door vit Teodor,” the man commanded. “Dimas, the vindow.” He was somewhere in his late twenties, with broad shoulders, dark hair, and darker eyes. His silk shirt was ten years out of fashion; the collar was embroidered with golden trilobites. His belt also held several knives, a second death ray, and an assortment of screwdrivers, pliers, and other tools that could have been for carpentry, were they not tipped with drying blood.

He turned back to women. They were huddled together around the baby, now, Anna and Terebithia still in front. Little Adrien was miraculously not screaming.

“Hullo! Mine name is Saturnus Heterodyne.” He spread his hands with a crooked smile, as if he wasn’t splattered with blood. “Hy know this iz awkward, but the Castle iz insistink that Hy at least _try_ to get married, und mine father iz agreeink this time. I heard there vould be eligible ladies here today, so Hy thought Hy vould come und try to meet them.”

There was a twitch of movement, and he suddenly had the disintegration ray back in his hand. “Mizz—Countess, vhatever—Hy know hyu iz married, because hyu haz that cute baby boy und this iz hiz party. So hyu is out ov the runnink for mine hand in marriage, and thus _expendable_. So Hy really think hyu should put that gun down.”

Behind Anna, still seated with her son on her lap, Eustasia slowly laid her pistol on the floor and kicked it toward the Heterodyne. He caught it with one foot and kicked it to the jäger behind him at the window.

“Und whoever had that pretty knife, iffen hyu haz more?”

“That was me,” Teodora stepped forward, her chin high and her hands in plain sight, holding knitting needles like daggers. “I don’t have more, but I suppose you’ll want these.”

The needles he took with his free hand, and said, “Hoy, iz that polycarbon fiber? Verra nice! That iz hyourz, then.” He gestured at a hanging on the wall, a spiraling embroidery so elaborately patterned that it always made Anna slightly ill to look at.

“Yes,” Teodora said proudly. Her spark had always been focused on threadcraft.

Terebithia gathered herself next, red hair cascading loose down her back, and stepped calmly over the blood to the sideboard. “I’ll pour more tea, then, shall I?”

And so they sat and drank tea with monsters. Anna literally offered some to the jägermonsters, and the one named Ivan accepted. Saturnus Heterodyne sat on the sofa and admired the bulletproof stitches in Teodora’s dress, looked wistful when Terebithia described the upcoming balls in Paris, and traded stories of Adrien for anecdotes from his own childhood, most of which involved monsters, near-death experiences, or both. Anna laughed more than once, while Mariya took notes on what not to do.

Then there was a buildup of shouting from the hallway again, and someone pounded on the door and shouted, “Master! Tings iz gettink fighty again!”, and he excused himself to stick his head out the door and shout, “Iffen anyvun interrupts mine nice tea, Hy _vill_ blow the heads off all these beautiful ladies! Giff me another thirty minutes!”

And then he sat back down and still, _still_ drew Anna into a debate on the merits of reattachment versus replacement for treating limb loss, and what defined a “construct” versus a “monster” versus a simple subject of surgery. When he finished his tea and stood to leave, she felt only relief when he bowed over Teodora’s hand and not hers, but she saw the jealousy behind Terebithia’s polite smile, when she had an entirely auspicious engagement awaiting her in Sturmhalten. Teodora’s eyes stayed alight with adrenaline for the rest of the day. Three months later, the Vodenicharovas’ town was ransacked and she was never seen again, stolen away behind Mechanicsburg’s dark walls.

So when Saturnus’s sons sat at her table, when Barry Heterodyne asked about the library that took up most of the first floor and Rerich launched with delight into the opportunity to explain his classification system to someone new; when Klaus suggested that perhaps the Heterodynes’ library might have a volume his father had been hunting for years and Bill Heterodyne allowed that it might be so, offered to check next time he was there and pass it on to Klaus if he found it, and Anna watched her husband’s eyes light with a familiar spark…

She let a clatter of fork on plate catch their attention as she stood. “It’s getting rather late. You boys may sustain yourselves on youth alone, but I think I shall accompany you on the tour of the estate tomorrow, and so I, an old and failing woman, must get some sleep.”

“You don’t need to put yourself out, ma’am,” Barry Heterodyne said hastily. “We’d be happy to—”

“Nonsense,” she said firmly. “Klaus hasn’t been home since last summer; he doesn’t even know about the new tractors.”

~{+}~

Of course they were attacked by a monster. It may have been the company of Heterodynes, or Klaus’s burgeoning instinct for heroic adventure, or simply the fact that nowhere outside thick walls was truly safe in a world of mad science, and even the stones of the Keep might not have held off the giant worm that burst from the soil at the edge of the timber wood.

Klaus sensed it first. “Underneath!” he shouted, and scooped his mother up into his arms. He was looking around, trying to triangulate the source of the growing quake, when the worm crested from the earth and sent them flying.

Anna pulled away in midair, tuckeding and rolling separately. She loved her son but she’d be flattened if he landed on top of her. Head ringing from the fall, she accepted a hand to her feet, and found that it was Barry Heterodyne’s.

“You alright?” he asked. A death ray glowed in his other hand.

“I will be.” She snatched another weapon from his belt and aimed it at the worm rearing over them, nearly ten feet tall and still coming out of the ground. The death ray shook in her hands, far too overpowered. She aimed for the center of the throat, past radially symmetrical, very sharp teeth, and fired as the monster lunged.

The retort nearly knocked her over. She dropped the gun. Klaus body-checked the worm, sending its head careening into a tree instead. “Get her out of here!”

“On it!” Barry shouted. He backed up with Anna behind him, taking searing blasts at the worm as he went. His hit, to little more effect than her missed shot. “Bill?!”

“ ** _DOWN!_** ” Bill Heterodyne bellowed from another tree, in a voice that had Anna on the ground before she’d even processed the command. There was a burst of light blinding even with her face pressed against the dirt, a soft _woomph_ , and the soft pattering of something wet on her back.

For a moment, it was quiet. A light wind moved through the trees and the wheat. Anna pressed her ear to the earth, but there were no more tremors to detect.

“Damn,” Barry Heterodyne said after a moment. “Bill was that the grenade you were fiddling with last week? That was fantastic.”

“Yeah.” The Heterodyne sounded immeasurably pleased with himself—not cruel or fugueing, just a clever teenager. “Pure concentrated light. Professor Axulev is going to _have_ to give me an A this time.”

“Damn,” Barry repeated. “I’m still seeing spots.”

Klaus got to his feet with a groan. “Would you please stop swearing in front of my mother.”

“He can say whatever the hell he wants,” Anna said, pushing herself carefully up from the ground. Her retinas were still firmly planted in her field of vision and she felt dizzy, but nothing much hurt. All three boys looked about the same—Bill had twigs in his hair and scrapes on his face and arms, and Klaus winced as he stretched the shoulder he’d rammed the worm with, but there was no blood and the effects of the grenade were already fading. Barry bent to pick up the death ray she had dropped.

Klaus wiped a handful of worm innards off his face—a fruitless task; they also covered his hair, Anna’s dress, and everything else within a roughly five-meter radius. The blood was a vivid dark green and seemed to be eating through the fabric of her skirt.

Klaus sniffed it and frowned. “This was one of Percoset’s mining worms, or a variant. Mother, has there been trouble with him recently? Or a problem with rogue mutants?”

Anna made the same inspection. The blood smelled of rotten raspberries. “Nothing in particular—we exchanged trade wagons last month, the usual late winter victuals for ore and building granite. He’s behind on his payments, but so much as to begrudge. There was a small earthquake from his direction last week, but there haven’t been any adverse rumors.”

Barony Percoset was Wulfenbach’s neighbor to the north, a reliable trading partner with an economy based mostly on its many mines and quarries. The spark had been in the family for many generations, and the current baron was no different; his shift from giant moles to giant worms had nearly doubled the mines’ output, though by all accounts he was having difficulty getting them energetic enough to go through stone.

This worm had been energetic enough to make it down from the high mountains and most of the way across Wulfenbach. And the last payment due for a shipment of winter wheat had not only not been paid; there hadn’t even been a note of apology and extension request. As if Percoset was not concerned at all about the debt.

“Perhaps you should pay him a visit,” she said slowly. “If there has been a scientific accident, well, we should have heard of it, even if there were few survivors. If not…”

Wulfenbach and Percoset were reliable sparring partners as well; they had last gone to war in Rerich’s grandfather’s generation. Both sides said the other had started it, and grudges were held, some friendly and some not.

She looked over her troops of the moment: two Heterodynes, unconcernedly covered in the blood of a monster and grinning brightly at one another, and Klaus, half again as tall as he had been once upon a time. He nodded as he acknowledged the responsibility of the possibly-diplomatic mission. _The_ Heterodyne gave her a thumbs up.

It felt like she was still holding the overpowered death ray.

~{+}~

It was the second-to-last day of his visit before Anna successfully strapped her son down in the medical lab. Not literally, of course—it was just a check-up.

“...And the refractory period has remained constant?”

Klaus’s eyes had long-since closed in embarrassment, but he answered dutifully. “Yes, about 15 minutes.”

She wrote down the figure with a click of her tongue. “Not very exact.”

“I’m not usually paying exact attention, Mother! What am I supposed to do, pull out a stopwatch and tell her, ‘Sorry, I have to time how long it takes me to start getting hard again after I ejaculate—it’s for my mother’?”

“You could say it’s for your _physician_ ,” she said, the harmonics of madness creeping into her voice. “It would get me an _excellent_ data set.”

Klaus, bless the boy, just rolled his eyes. He had grown very blase over the years about being his mother’s masterpiece science experiment. It made everything so much easier.

(It was easier for both of them. It was easier for Klaus to act like a son humoring his mother’s spark and worried maternal affection, and not like some definitions would not count him as human because for a brief, terrible time he had been nothing but parts on the floor of an exploded laboratory, mixed and scavenged for whatever was most intact and it was a miracle that Nikolaus’s head had been whole. It was easier for Anna to tease her youngest boy and sink into a fugue of pride and care for the finest sparkwork of her life, checking for any sign of graft rejections in a _whole_ and _complete_ project, not Josef’s bloody arm and Wolfgang’s half-crumpled left lung and–)

“And what do you say when they ask you about your scars?” she asked sharply.

Klaus sighed at another question asked every time, but said reassuringly. “I don’t take off my shirt much, or people just assume they’re from adventures. It’s useful, really that I’ve been doing that more with Bill and Barry.”

She _hmm_ ed and flipped through her notebook. “Very well. That’s cardiovascular, respiratory, lymphomic, digestive, nervous, integumentary, endocrinal, renal, muscular, skeletal, and reproductive.... Time for the _physical_ portion.” She set her notebook on the supplies table, trading it for fine gloves. “Shirt off. Pants, too; all of it.”

She gave him a moment of privacy by turning to inspect the various analytical engines on the sideboard. The Centrifuginator 3000 chugged away happily on the blood sample she had drawn before even getting Klaus on the table, while lesser sequencers, analyzers, and one laser-searing fibrosis engine broke down urine, enamel, skin, and other samples. It would be several more minutes before she had any results—tragically, mechanics had never been her forte; and there was little she could do to speed up the processes.

“I don’t hear _undressing_ ” she said. “You don’t have anything I haven’t seen before, my boy.”

“Mother…”

“ _Now_ , Klaus.” She peered at the rings appearing in the Centrifuginator’s spheres. Hm, low riboflavin.

There was a long, drawn-out sigh and the rustle of cloth. Anna donned her favorite stethoscope and turned back with a gleam in her eye.

Klaus barely had his shirt over his head, but it was enough to see the scars criss-crossing his upper body. Most were her originals—clumsy with speed, stitch marks still plain to see, but _strong_. Some had come later, much neater follow-up or responses to further odd accidents. Some were Klaus’s own, clumsy from self-application but generally well-sewn.

Some were new, and neither Anna’s work nor her son’s. Small-stitched and tight and slightly overdone, they spiraled out from his right shoulder to sketch the lines of his musculocutaneous nerves, teasing up the sides of his neck and down the aorta.

She said flatly, “ _What_.”

Klaus winced. “I tried to say—it’s nothing, really. I got a little hurt by a clank, so Bill and Barry—”

“You let _Heterodynes operate_ on you?!”

“‘Let’ is a strong word. I wasn’t exactly conscious. But—”

The red scent of blood rose up around her, rage and war. “ _Nikolaus Theodred Wulfenbach_ , _you_ stay _right here_. _I_ will deal with _this_.”

“Mother—”

Anna was already gone. She flew down the stairs and slammed open the heavy double doors of Rerich’s library. The Heterodynes were seated in armchairs at one of the study tables, being interrogated over tea as to the difference between Mechanicsburg and everywhere-else stories of the Storm King. Rerich sat across from them, a pencil behind each ear and notebooks and historical texts spread across the table, competing for space only with a large platter of, now, pastry crumbs. Rerich did little more than look up when Anna stormed in, the light of spark-fueled historical research shining in his eyes. The Heterodynes sprang to their feet, almost but not quite back to back. Bill Heterodyne made an abortive gesture toward where a weapon would lie at his hip.

Anna advanced with a snarl, scalpel aimed at the Heterodyne’s chest. “ _What_ did you do to my _son_.”

“Mostly just endangered him!” Barry Heterodyne blurted.

Bill Heterodyne stepped on his brother’s foot. “That is, mostly just engaged in heroics together, ma’am, and lab work. If you’re referring to the one time we had to do some emergency surgery—”

“He really was bleeding a lot—”

“—so mostly we stopped that, and re-set the muscles—”

“—and got a little carried away with the lightning-proofing, but—”

“—the groundwork was already _incredibly_ well-laid—”

“—We would have asked permission if he’d been conscious, but, well, we were in a fugue—”

“—which doesn’t excuse anything.” Bill Heterodyne finished, back straight. “We accept full responsibility for our actions.” His eyes flicked over her shoulder. “Klaus said he forgave us so long as we never did it again, which we haven’t.”

“I can verify that.”

Anna glared over her shoulder at her son, who had followed her downstairs despite _express_ instructions otherwise. He was still stripped to his trousers, but he crossed his arms and stood by the door with confidence.

The Heterodynes stood with the ramrod-straight tension and determinedly steady gazes of children waiting to be chastised. It was difficult to maintain her sparking rage, in the face of that.

“We made notes,” Bill offered. “Klaus said you might be...concerned, so we brought them for your review, and to add to your records if you’d like.”

Her grip on the scalpel loosened.

“I– excuse me,” she said, and fled with barely a shred of dignity.

-

Rerich found her some ten minutes later, sitting against the wall of one of the third-floor spare bedrooms. Josef’s, in fact. Her head was on her knees and her breathing too quick.

He slid down beside her, leaning on Minerva and the wall in equal measure, and she did not comment, because he knew his own abilities. He rubbed her back while she finished getting her nerves under control.

Eventually, head still on her knees, Anna managed, “Did I– did I just threaten two Heterodynes, while armed with nothing but a scalpel?”

“You certainly did,” said Rerich, and he sounded so genuinely enamored that she almost laughed, despite the iron bands still taut around her chest.

Instead, she raised her head and leaned it against his shoulder, and asked the room at large, “Did I just threaten two teenagers—two _children_ —while in the Madness Place, and holding a bladed weapon? Children who certainly grew up with enough of that, and are perhaps earnestly trying to do right by our son, and by the world at large?”

“It’s possible,” Rerich admitted.

It was a great comfort to Anna that he, too, addressed the musty bedroom with baffled uncertainty, like at any moment the floor might become the ceiling. Anything was possible in a world of mad science, but Heterodynes, heroes?

Rerich took her hand. “Look on the positive side. If any local ruling family had to find out about Klaus’s ‘condition’, it’s certainly the ones least likely to kick up a fuss. The last time anyone managed a census, in 1723, Mechanicsburg was plurality construct or reanimated, and theorized to be majority based on extrapolation of the small sample the census-takers interviewed underground before being eaten.”

With something between a snort and a groan, Anna put her head back on her knees. “Unfortunately, you’re certainly right.”

~{+}~

Finally, it was time for the boys to leave: Klaus back to Beetlesburg to finish up some projects before the break ended, the Heterodynes to stop in Mechanicsburg first to make sure everything was still running smoothly. Anna would not have been impressed with any less diligence, in rulers of an independent city-state.

They had not, thank god, invited Klaus. Still, she cornered them in a spare coatroom on the morning of their departure, while Rerich distracted Klaus with a paternal lecture about how best to pack his textbooks. With the door closed, the little vestibule barely had room for its rack of winter furs plus three people, much less space to draw another scalpel. That was fine—after some thought, Anna had confined her weaponry to her sharpest maternal glare.

“You are welcome to visit again, and I encourage you to continue pursuing heroics. Your mother would be proud. _But_.”

It was _easy_ to summon the fury of the Madness Place, to stand before the door and pin the Heterodynes against the row of old furs. She had so many dead to remember: soldiers and friends, fathers and sons.

“If this is some sort of _trick_ , or _trap_ , or you lay a _single finger on my son or my people_ , I do not _care_ who your warmongering ancestors were, or how many monsters are at your command in your bedamned city. Heterodynes or children or not, I will _end you_.”

She held their eyes and did not back down, not at their anxious twitches and defiant stares nor the trilobite-marked death rays on their belts.

Anna crossed her arms. “Are we _clear_.”

“As pure water, ma’am,” Bill Heterodyne said smartly.

Then he hesitated. “You– did you know our mother?”

“Teodora? Yes.” Anna was surprised by the subject change, but she was not done being ruthless. “We were friends, before your father kidnapped her.”

Both boys winced, almost imperceptibly, and she regretted her words. Bill looked at Barry, Barry looked back and gave the shadow of a nod, and Bill squared his shoulders and told Anna, “She killed him.”

“What?”

Barry looked far more like a man with nothing to lose than a fifteen-year-old should. “Our mother killed our father. Because he was going to kill us, we th—” He glanced at Bill. “We know. She poisoned his wine. And then the Castle killed her, for killing the Heterodyne.”

“We weren’t home.” Bill’s voice was choked; he stared past her and his hands fidgeted like he desperately wanted to take something apart. “We’d snuck out, again. That’s why he— it was the last— I would have stopped it, but—”

Barry took a step to press himself against Bill’s side. He said, “Nobody else knows.”

“Nobody outside Mechanicsburg,” Bill said quickly. “And even then, not many. There was some...dissent when we took over. With blood. And fire.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and met her eyes again. “We don’t want to fight anyone, we really don’t. So it seemed best not to give anyone the impression that Mechanicsburg or our control of it might be weak.”

The floor was becoming the ceiling, but Anna asked reflexively,  “Is it?”

“ _No_ ,” the Heterodynes chorused.

Barry was slightly resigned. Bill spoke it was true through sheer force of his (very seventeen-year-old) will—and likely it was.

“Oh. Well. Good, I suppose.” A weak Mechanicsburg was a fantasy, so better it was under the control of…

The coat room door shook as Klaus hammered on the old wood. “Mother, are you done bullying my friends yet? We have a train to catch!”

Both Heterodynes perked up, like pups who had just heard the word “walk.” Then they cast cautious looks back at Anna. She found she could not help but smile back.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said quietly, and yanked open the door before Klaus could knock again.

“You don’t have to shout, my boy. I was only instilling in them the virtue of making sure _you_ come home for longer than a week, this summer.” She tapped him on the too-broad chest as she pushed past. “Stitches!”

Klaus raised his eyebrows—at the blatant lie, at her open reference to his..injuries, in front of guests. Behind him, she caught a glimpse of Rerich nodding, ever so slightly, as he and Minerva watched them all. She looked back and found the Heterodyne Boys nodding as though they’d been given a solemn duty, with no sign of concern whatsoever over Klaus’s condition.

Maybe that, in the end, was why she added, “You boys are welcome, too. We have enough spare bedrooms.”

Wulfenbach Keep had never fallen to the Heterodynes, but it had allied more than once. Bowing or tall, the tower had always, would always, stand strong.

**Author's Note:**

> I would fucking die for Anna Wulfenbach; thank you and goodnight. I invite you to comment with your favorite line or moment in the fic!


End file.
